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A man commits a terrorist attack in a museum of contemporary art, killing 49 children and a teacher. He waits on death row for seven years. A week before his execution, he convinces the police detective who was in charge of his case to join him for his last meal. What meaning do these two men hope to find in the death that they both desire, each in their own way?

On a bare stage under bright light, six hapless clowns do their best to get along and pass the time. They fight and chase in eruptions of uneasy mayhem, then cool off a little, settle and wait for the whole thing to kick off again. Carefully unbalanced between funny and not funny, Out Of Order is the ruins of a show in the ruins of a world.

In the growing series Simple as ABC, Thomas Bellinck focuses on the Western migration management machine. This third instalment takes you to an imagined museum where there are only voices. You hear scraps of Arabic, English, Farsi, French, and Greek, gathered around the Mediterranean Sea. The absent narrators share their stories and thus sketch a many-voiced portrait of the contemporary hunt for humans.

Since time immemorial, the idea of an island as a place of infinite possibilities has been a source of inspiration for writers and artists. In Crash Park, theatre-maker Philippe Quesne has written his own robinsonade. When the survivors of a plane crash emerge from the wreckage, they encounter the desert island and its inhabitants. Epic scenes alternate with melancholic wanderings, while this contemporary fable spotlights the greatness and the failings of the human race.

Two men – both imprisoned in one way or another – want to live it up one last time. Begin the Beguine is the last text that the legendary filmmaker John Cassavetes ever wrote. The jet-black allegory about love and death was kept in a cupboard for 25 years by Cassavetes’ heirs. Until the German publisher S. Fischer Verlag asked Jan Lauwers to take on the staging of this masterpiece.

They’ve had enough of lonely nights onstage, so Laura van Dolron and Willem de Wolf from the KOE want to answer all your questions. The actors search and struggle, assisted by two musicians. Every evening, this results in a live philosophical theatre concert full of poetry, thought, action, hope and despair…and ultimately there is perhaps one answer that transcends all questions.

Philosopher Bruno Latour and theatre maker Frédérique Aït-Touati reflect on the relationship between human beings and their environment. Can we change our perception of the earth? No longer from a great distance, like a blue marble flying through space… But from the inside out, from the wafer-thin outer layer of the globe on which all life, human activity and resources are concentrated?

In Museum of Lungs, author and performer Stacy Hardy talks about her life with TBC, about the years before the diagnosis, and about her treatments since. She combines intimate, personal testimonies with historical archival materials. Together with musicians Neo Muyanga and Nancy Mounir, director Laila Soliman and Hardy also show how vulnerability and disease can initiate resistance and change.

In a stimulating theatrical game, you as the audience explore the limits of the imaginable, beyond what is true, good, or politically correct. Can the most cheerful, strange, improbable, and wild fantasies influence the world that we share together? The stakes in the game? To make time and space for our own imagination.

Do playwrights – like sculptors and painters – have studios where they turn their ideas into material? Matthias de Koning, Damiaan De Schrijver and Peter Van den Eede construct the fourth wall, and subsequently demolish it again. Welcome to this laboratory of naturalism, realism and hyperrealism!

What is happiness? In what dark and remote corners do we have to crawl individually and collectively to find it? Together with dancers from the EnKnapGroup, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper have created a bizarre, painful and hilarious horror comedy about voracious expansion in the Wild West and all the violence that ensued as a result.

Prague Castle, 5 AM. The master of ceremonies appointed by Václav Havel finds an EU commissioner asleep under the conference table. Things clearly got out of hand, but what if this is the morning when things turn out for the best? Pieter De Buysser presents a play about magnanimity and magic, about human failings and the glorious dawn of politics.

In their characteristic style, the ladies of Discordia break open the plot of Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel The Lady of the Camellias. They seek the assistance – perhaps surprisingly – of the Marquis de Sade. Is there space for Marguerite to have a more active role, or do shame and conventional thinking still stand in the way?

In their ‘oeuvre pieces’, the creators at De Warme Winkel throw the work, life, and zeitgeist of an artist onto the canvas of the present. A century after the October Revolution, they are turning to the most important Russian literary futurist: Vladimir Mayakovski. Expect an elegy of revolution and protest!

Forced Entertainment’s new production creates a world of absurd disconnection, struggle and comic repetition. The performers take part in an impossible illusion, while something unfolds that is part chaotic TV programme, part cabaret act, and part telepathic feat. The result is a compelling performance about optimism, individual agency and the desire for change: pure magic!

Five figures form a portrait of humanity in the insane twentieth century, awaiting the inevitable catastrophe. Wars, simmering conflicts, terrorism, ecological disasters… an ever-greater number of possible endings present themselves. Despite the shock, they continue to talk, perform, and play music.

In Cinema Dialogue, Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klaßen critically examine the United Nations’ ostensibly apolitical Millennium Development Goals. They juxtapose the universalism of the UN programme with the local reality of urban development in Kinshasa between 2000 and the present day.

When you read, you make choices. You translate what you read into the language of your life. A book like Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina could also be the collection of lives it has changed, for better or for worse. In this first play Tiago Rodrigues writes for tg STAN, he convincingly builds a bridge between the actors of the Portuguese Teatro Nacional and those of STAN.

Caspar Western Friedrich combines the narrative force of the Western with the dreamy longings of Romanticism. Drawing his inspiration from the lonesome cowboy and from the paintings and personality of Caspar David Friedrich, Philippe Quesne builds a studio of landscapes on stage.

Forced Entertainment performs Shakespeare’s complete works in only six days. In 36 mini plays that are as funny and fascinating as they are accessible, the theatre pioneers demonstrate their impressive storytelling power yet again. The cast? Everyday home, garden, and kitchen objects. The stage? A one-metre table top.

In 1918, as WW1 was gradually drawing to a close, François Georges Picot and Mark Sykes – a French and a British diplomat respectively – were studying the map of the Middle East. In a secret agreement, they redrew the borders, and the consequences of this act can still be felt today. In Vanishing State, Lucien Bourjeily gives you the chance to go through this exercise afresh, in the full knowledge of what has happened in the Levant over the past hundred years.

With an annually recurring city cycle, Moussem’s Nomadic Arts Centre offers an insight into contemporary Arab societies and the dynamic of their cities. Every year, an Arab city is a guest in the capital of Europe. Over the course of this ten-day festival, guest artists, relevant thinkers and cultural players tell the story of their city through their work.

Six times now, Maatschappij Discordia has created a performance from a female perspective with their focus series Weiblicher Akt. The seventh part is about women and power. Discordia adapts the plot of Shakespeare’s famous Macbeth to create a story from the woman’s point of view. It becomes Mevrouw (Lady) Macbeth.

Who is not familiar with this legend? Shakespeare made a tragedy of it and Mankiewicz turned it into a masterful, insanely expensive Hollywood film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. In his version, Tiago Rodrigues does not opt for the monumentality of the legend but goes for a refined distillation.